I'm an IT professional for just about 2 decades and welp, this one has me stumped so I figured I would ask here.
I've got a TUF F15 (2023) FX507ZI4. That's the one that's equipped with the:
- i7-12700h
- RTX 4070 mobile
- 1TB NVME SSD
- OS is Windows 11 23H2
I've had this issue for the past month or so where the computer would just seemingly lock up at random. Almost dead to the world to the point where I couldn't move the mouse cursor, ctrl-alt-del did nothing, and so on. Thing is, if I just left it alone eventually it would "come to its senses" and start working again like nothing had happened. Eventually, while preparing to play some Master Chief Collection with some friends, I was able to get it to happen consistently. When that application launches, it happens. Locks up to all input but if I just leave it alone it eventually recovers.
So here's what I was able to rule out VIA troubleshooting:
- The CPU is not overheating nor is it throttling
- The GPU is not the cause as I can run furmark for hours and it's perfectly fine though a little toasty
- The 2 8gb SODIMMS the laptop came with test fine in both the Asus system diagnostic and memtest. It'll run for hours with no issue.
- Armoury Crate is not the cause, Googling this issue lead me to believe that something in Armoury Crate could cause this so I completely removed it and disabled its interface in the BIOS
- It doesn't seem to be the BIOS, I've got the latest 323 BIOS but I've noticed it on the previous versions too.
- I've updated all drivers to the latest and "greatest" versions. This included Intel RST drivers which didn't seem to change from the stock Asus versions....that'll be important later.
In my troubleshooting I've found disk retry errors in the system event log. Thinking it could be a bad SSD (Stock SSD was a WD PC SN560 - seems to be a "white label" OEM drive) I replaced it for a known good SSD (WD SN770 2TB) with a fresh install of Windows 11. Same issue. Thinking it could be that I'm just doing something wrong, I ceased using my clean install USB and recovered the factory image. Same issue! I tried using newer Intel RST drivers from Intel directly but, despite installing with no errors, the same version driver was reported in device manager as the stock Asus one.
So besides contacting Asus support directly and possibly sending it in for repair, still under warranty, does anyone have any ideas? Am I dealing with a weird Intel RST bug, some odd BIOS issue, am I completely on the wrong track entirely? Even more annoying, the one application I could get it to happen consistently and on command, master chief collection on Steam, no longer does it! ahhh, the fun of diagnosing issues!
Any and all advice is appreciated!
